putting together a horror watchlist for the coming fall chill and halloween holiday season… taking suggestions for stuff in this mode (mostly 80s and 90s horror i guess?)
here’s a list i put together of my fav horror movies
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Pumpkin man!
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Back when we did our weekly double feature get togethers, one of the crew was a stickler and just wanted to do horror movies about Halloween rather than just any old horror movie for October. There’s a lot of them and I don’t even think we watched any of the Halloween series.
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My local Alamo Drafthouse knock off theater is doing a buy one get four ticket thing to be used on horror movies throughout the month.
There’s definitely some stuff I’d wanna see on a big screen (The Thing! Nightmare on Elm Street! The Monster Squad! Fright Night!), but food there is so expensive, and I already own those movies, and a projector, and can probably make nachos on the cheap…
bram stoker’s dracula is now the yearly halloween night watch at my place, this year i want to double bill it with the latest Hell House LLC movie to catch up on the latest developments in pennsylvanian italian catholic X evil clown mannequin lore. even tho the new one is meant to be NOT found footage…?!
watchlist so far this year:
drag me to hell (holds up imo, very fun haunted house ride ass movie about spraying people with gunge or sticking something weird in their mouths whenever things flag just a little)
phase iv (half nature documentary with v good 70s synth noodling over ant footage and half quatermass style scientist paranoia)
still to see:
ganja & hess
dead & buried
scream
angel dust
the seventh curse
of unknown origin
disembodied
born of fire
fave movies from last halloween: the deadly spawn, terrorvision. least favourite was frogman which feels legally defamatory against the loveland frog by implying he’s a pervert monster and not just a regular big frog.
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It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Dead & Buried but it’s a pretty good time. Fun final appearance by the guy who played Grandpa Joe in Willy Wonka as the town mortician.
watched this one a year or two ago and it’s something special for sure…
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i watched ganja & hess and the seventh curse… the sound in g&h is amazing, in addition to the soundtrack (by nina simone’s brother!) there’s a willingness to play sound against image in weird and intense ways that i found really striking and unsettling, even though for the most part it’s not really interested in being a horror move. very funny to think this was funded by someone thinking they were getting blacula 2. meanwhile the seventh curse has a creepy little xenomorph puppet “ghost baby” that flies at people and gets them. i liked both these movies pretty equally i think
in addition to movies for the season i am checking out marble hornets, “the slenderman one”, for the first time. due to increased interest in found footage and internet horror i sort of had to watch this eventually.. it’s alright, benefits a lot from early youtube feeling, lots of minute long videos where it’s hard to make out any details under the compression. some really inventive stuff people are still riffing on over a decade later, at least one actually startling moment. unfortunately… its slenderman. he looks like the youtube thumbnail for a videogames channel called TheDapperBrit, he looks like a fuckin ragesona, as creatively as they try there’s only so much visual mileage they can get from this thing. there is a secondary scary guy who looks like jeff the killer instead. i do enjoy the very 2009-ness of this (the sideburns! the shorts!) but the 00s giveth and the 00s taketh away.
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Seventh Curse was good, my letterboxd review summed up my feelings pretty comprehensively
Sort of a shame that Chow Yun-fat was only a side character, especially as he’s handily the most charismatic actor to play Wisely
The ludicrous child juicing machine made me scream laugh. Every part of this is brazen and tasteless and so much fun. Temple of Doom with xenomorphs and worm sorcery.
As usual for movies based on the works of Ni Kuang, all of the side characters are far more entertaining and engaging than the lead, and Wisely’s niece played by Maggie Cheung absolutely steals the show as an impetuous and reckless photojournalist.
The Seventh Curse is an unashamed glorification of excess, so that even the shortcomings (and there are quite a few) don’t affect my feelings on the film
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the child crusher was so good. just loading kids into it like oranges in the supermarket juice machine
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I got to see Deadly Spawn in a theater years ago during a pair of magical summers where Synapse was doing monthly double features of their catalog (also the first times I got to see Rock n Roll Nightmare and Wild Zero). That final miniature shot is so good.
Terrorvision is a lot of fun too. That was in lineup last year at Mahoning’s VHS Fest.
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Speaking of theatrical screenings, I’ve got Only Lovers Left Alive and Bram Stroker’s Dracula lined up in the next two weeks. There’s generally a good appropriate silent happening too but I haven’t looked that far ahead.
Last Devils’ Night I was pushing Inertia: Re-Making the Crow about the fan film, but we ended up watching the Brandon Lee one instead (which makes sense since Devils’ Night doesn’t even factor into the original comic). Hopefully I’ll win this year (or we can watch Wicked Prayer with Dennis Hopper as the jive talking Satanic pimp instead).
So far this season we’ve watched Devil Story (which was fucking wild, a guy shoots at a horse for hours but can’t kill it), and half of the nearly 3 hour long Devil Ant (which got me to eBay the same rubber ant used in the movie) last time we had a movie night get together. I’m dying to watch the rest of Devil Ant, I guess Hillary Clinton shows up somehow in the back half. On and I finally saw the new Candyman. I liked it but it’s also a real movie for normal people so it looses some umph in the shadow of Devil Ant.
I’ve also got Donald Farmer’s Red Lips on the docket. It’s supposed to be a SOV 90s lesbian vampire thing.
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Devil Ant rules
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Finally got the time to watch a horror movie this month (and a Halloween one, at that!) and watched the first Terrifier.
It was…actually kinda lame, I guess. I think the clown villain is good, it’s just the whole everything else about it that’s, well, ehhh.
I mean the color grading is kinda cool in a grungy way. I guess that’s a second positive. The first heroine character was decent, too, I guess.
Anyway I’d avoided the movie forever after hearing how nasty it was and one kill in particular, but I think whatever I conjured in my head reading about it was worse than the thing in reality.
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expanding my horror movie watchlist… it was all stuff i havent seen, since making it the only one i have watched is the miike takashi film “one missed call” (very good!)
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Terrifier sucks. It’s just popular, but for what reason I can’t tell you.
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it’s probably a lot of young horror fan’s first violent movie, since a lot of modern horror is bloodless, and streaming services (especially netflix) hide or just don’t have older movies of any genre outside of the big family classics. so for those people, it’s like their first flavoured food after being brought up on boiled chicken and mashed potatoes
i’m only guessing though
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look i never want to watch these movies but the promo with the guy’s booming voice fading in and out incomprehensibly is kind of delighting me… anyway i found it bc i enjoyed Disembodied (1998) and was also intrigued by the production company’s logo.
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